In An Era Of Unlimited Photos What Are We Really Capturing About The World?

A woman takes a selfie picture with her mobile phone as Turkish Kurds gather during Newroz celebrations in Diyarbakir, on March 21, 2016. (ILYAS AKENGIN/AFP/Getty Images)

A century and a half ago few books contained illustrations due to the enormous cost of printing images and those that did were almost exclusively monochrome. To the average person strange lands or world changing events were understood primarily through words or at best in black and white. Fast forward to today and by 2013 Facebook was home to more than a quarter trillion photographs with over 350 million more added each day. Cell phones have largely replaced standalone cameras and power the photographic engine that saturates our modern world with imagery. How is this visual revolution changing how we understand the world around us?

For my undergraduate thesis 12 years ago I set out to create what I called a “photographic time capsule” of the University of Illinois, eventually taking more than a quarter million photographs capturing every square inch of the campus’ hundreds of buildings and structures over several years. I traveled across campus day and night through the four seasons capturing everything from the iconic round barns to the engineering quad to the campus in snow, at night, from the air or shrouded in fog. I documented the annual engineering and agricultural open houses and building dedications and created special collections ranging from flowers to campus streets to nineteenth century mathematical models. I made the entire collection available for public download and created everything from desktop wallpapers to printable calendars to virtual campus tours.

While today there might be a quarter million photographs taken on the campus every week, one has to remember that the entire project was done more than a decade ago as the work of a single undergraduate student in his spare time.

The project began simply enough, when I received my first “picture phone” capable of 640x480 pixel grainy images. Despite having no prior photographic experience, I began snapping photos across campus before upgrading to a point-and-shoot and eventually a full DSLR camera. At the time there was no single comprehensive archive of campus imagery and so campus leaders encouraged me to create an open website to host all of my images and make them available to the campus community.

While today uploading a few tens of thousands of photographs to the web is something that can be accomplished with a single mouse click, recall that this was all done before image sharing sites like Flickr were around (Flickr didn’t debut until 2004) and during a time period when hosting terabytes of web-accessible imagery was a major endeavor.

Simply cataloging that many images was an endeavor in itself. GPS tagging of photographs existed at the time, but only the most expensive professional cameras supported such tagging, while indoor imagery was entirely beyond any locative technology of the day to tag with high precision. Instead, I had to develop workflows that allowed me to photograph 50 or more buildings in a single day, then return to my desk and manually catalog thousands upon thousands of photographs, trying to recall whether a given brick wall belonged to building A or building B. I took so many photographs that I burned out the shutter on two different DSLR cameras (at the time a prosumer DSLR shutter was rated for around 125,000 photographs before failing). I had to develop all of the workflow management software from scratch that allowed me to ingest and tag so many images and instantly publish them to the world, as well as build the website infrastructure to make the images available for download, while recording where the images were being used.

Fast forward to today and the majority of the student body at Illinois carries with them 24/7 a cell phone equipped with a camera orders of magnitude more powerful than the devices I used and which automatically tags each image with the precise GPS coordinates where it was taken. Many likely have their phones set to automatically publish the image directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr or any other of a myriad publishing platforms. Within seconds their friends have likely tagged each person in the image with their name and potentially even typed up a description of the events depicted in the image and their significance and shared it onward with thousands of other friends who might find it of interest.

Instead of a single dedicated volunteer spending his every available moment meticulously cataloging the campus, you have a massive network of tens of thousands of individuals capturing events from a first person view as they live them. Today we have a better historical record of the typical American college student’s Friday night out than we do of the entire Roman Empire. Does this mean the idea of professionally documenting society is now obsolete, replaced by realtime first person documentaries?

Last year I wrote for The Atlantic tracing out how the geographic footprint of Twitter had largely frozen in place, meaning that the view we see of the world through Twitter is an incredibly skewed one. Eric Fischer has written extensively on the biases and limitations of social media, famously mapping in 2011 the very different footprints of Twitter and Flickr. As one might expect, at the time Flickr images tended to congregate around photogenic tourist hotspots, capturing an incredibly skewed geography of the cityscape.

Today the millions of images that emerge each Friday night from American college campuses tend to center on the social life of campus, capturing bars, dormitories, apartments, Greek houses, theaters and the like. How many of those images document classrooms, faculty offices, research laboratories, loading docks and the myriad other more mundane elements of campus life? Images today are more likely to feature the campus bar than the engineering library loading dock, showcase the main quad rather than a remote storage shed deep in the south farms. Images of beautiful sunny days far outnumber those of torrential downpours capturing areas of poor drainage or puddles. Few are likely to trek deep into the campus farms in -10F air temperature with 30MPH winds at sunset to capture the last rays of a winter day setting over the round barns. This means that our view of modern campus life is likely to be heavily skewed.

At Illinois I was once contacted by the alumni magazine because it turns out the university could not locate a single usable image of a prominent dormitory building they had just demolished that had been a big part of student life for decades. Despite being the central hub for one of the larger dormitory complexes on campus, the building was so non-photogenic that neither campus nor student photographers had ever thought to extensively document it until after it had been torn down.

More critically, the majority of the imagery taken today by students and others is likely to be published to private social media profiles, accessible only to friends and followers. While Facebook might have held more than a quarter trillion photographs in early 2013, it is likely that most will never be made available to historians. Even when publicly published such images rarely come with licensing terms or contact information to facilitate realtime licensing for news reporting or historical preservation.

Perhaps the question asked least today is what will happen to all of this imagery in the future? The typical college student today is more preoccupied with finding the easiest way to capture an important moment and share it with his or her friends in realtime than worrying about preserving that image for historians to access hundreds of years from now. In fact, few think about who controls their photographic life until their social media account is suspended or deleted by a hacker and with a mouse click they lose every image they’ve taken.

What will happen to Facebook’s vast photographic archives if the company ever folds or decides to discontinue free image hosting? As the number of images stored on the site continues to increase exponentially, what will happen if it decides to save on hosting costs by automatically expiring images that have not been looked at for more than 5 years? Moreover, many image sharing platforms, especially in the early days of image hosting, automatically resized and down sampled uploaded images to web-friendly sizes, discarding the full resolution image and saving only the low quality version. One student group I worked with at Illinois had been uploading all of their images to a popular social media site over the years without keeping the originals and came to find that the site had retained only the low resolution versions of each image, meaning they had lost forever the high resolution versions of those photographs.

Putting this all together, we live in a world today saturated by photographs where every person with a phone can be a photographer live documenting the world around them. Yet, the biases of the online world mean that while offering an exquisitely high resolution view of parts of the world, we end up being blind to the rest of it. Most importantly, the notion of how to archive and preserve all of this imagery for future generations has received precious little attention, meaning it is unclear how much of this incredible view of society will persevere for future historians.

In short, our modern image-saturated world offers us more memories than ever before, but what are they of and will we remember them?

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never before...